You and me, let’s do it, let’s start it,
Us Anonymous.
They’ll come, you’ll see,
every one of them, they’ll come.

We’ll launch with a desperate desire
because that’s the key to it, I think, desperation.
To celebrate, we’ll take every last, nasty thing
that we can be and pour them into some fireworks.
We’ll seal them up and prime them down
and launch them way up high.
When they explode (and count on it, they will)
every little part that we let go
will burn and glow in full public view
(painfully it’s true, but just for a moment)
before fading…leaving our dreams on the air,
dispersing everywhere.
Gosh, I can see it now, it will be beautiful.
It will.

Thank you so much for reading Us Anonymous. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Such a magical little thing is light
slipping quietly through clear water.
I wonder: what would we expect
if we could not expect,
(and expect to expect)
forgiveness?

The standard of conduct set by all the world’s major religions would be cruelly hard if not tempered with forgiveness. The standard expected by all the Messengers of God, and indeed the standard that They set in Their very own lives, resonates clear as the example that we should aspire to, and in aspiring to, being the best and the happiest that we can be. And yet, being human, only human—merely human—we will fail, and fail often. Forgiveness acts as the glue that holds our journey together, in the sense that it allows us to fail, but also then allows us to retry, and, hopefully, in the end, to succeed with whatever spiritual battle we are facing.

Thank you so much for reading In this glass. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Weights on me, weights on you
weights in the fixed frames we’ve become:
smiles in blue, cheeks in red,
heartbeats in that odd shade of rapid.

But gone? No never,
that’s not the way it plays out, at least not for me.
It was and is a race where you chase only yourself,
which is wearisome, but apparently fun too—
because I never did learn to make it stop.
And if it makes you become who you are,
that’s only after it becomes what you’ve made it,
and that just seems so unfair:
half the time you don’t even know you’re in the running.

And what do so many folks drag along in this race,
even if they don’t know they’re set to lose?
But of course you know: weights on them,
weights on me, weights on the fix thereafter.
The odd thing is, that that’s the part that matters.

A friend once joked that I, like many others (mainly those raised as Catholics and Jews) are life long members of G.U.I.L.T: Group Under the Influence of Liturgical Training. Perhaps the old saying, “Many a true word is spoken in jest” is appropriate here.

Thank you so much for reading Weights. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.

At the end of a day of fasting
it takes so little to satisfy me.
Is that the point?

When a lamp is lit the light must first
beg forgiveness of the wick,
the wick the forbearance of the oil,
and the oil the patience of the sun.
I know that without struggle there is
no merit in victory, but at night, still,
I lie awake thinking: without struggle,
how do we keep the night away?

I am foolish, I know,
I should leave it to our children
to figure it out. Now is rightly time
for me to beg the patience of my Sun
and turn off the light and sleep.
Tomorrow is, after all, another day of fasting.

The Bahá’í Fast—when Bahá’ís refrain from eating or drinking from sunup until sundown—lasts from March 2 through to the 21st. March 21st, generally the date of the Spring Equinox, is referred to as Naw-Ruz, or New Year, and is the first day of the Bahá’í Calendar. This holiday actually predates the Bahá’í Faith and is an ancient celebration held throughout much of the Near East, generally, throughout the area that once marked Alexander The Great’s empire.

At the beginning of the fast period, I had the pleasure of posting an incredibly beautiful poem called The Copper Tree Tops, by Lyn, my wonderful and long suffering wife. Today I get to bookend that effort with my own much lesser effort on fasting, Another Day of Fasting.

It is indeed a privilege and an honor to take part in the fast. I can honestly say that the effort required, which honestly is not a lot, is far outweighed by what one gets in return: a sense of accomplishment, of joy and of humility.

Thank you so much for reading Another Day of Fasting. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Anointed for faith and fidelity,
they are gone now astray
and around the pit they stagger,
those lusty ones, our idols,
bloodied, battered and broken.

And so in our holiness we scream
for another yet another and another—
because the dark that is coming is getting darker.
And though we swing and dodge as we may
and prove ourselves worthy with each new failure,
it never seems to matter,
for as sure as there is faith in tomorrow,
we must protect ourselves, today.

This poem is based on:

As the new millennium approaches, the crucial need of the human race is to find a unifying vision of the nature of man and society. For the past century humanity’s response to this impulse has driven a succession of ideological upheavals that have convulsed our world and that appear now to have exhausted themselves. The passion invested in the struggle, despite its disheartening results, testifies to the depth of the need. For, without a common conviction about the course and direction of human history, it is inconceivable that foundations can be laid for a global society to which the mass of humankind can commit themselves.

This passage is from the Statement on Bahá’u’lláh: His Life and Work, issued to mark the 1992 centenary of the passing of Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith.

Thank you so much for reading Worthy. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Her balance is in
the flow of scent-whispered questions
which scorch the air around her,
the sparks from the caffeine
leaving your lips lonely and wanting more.Not you, me, says that walk,
as she sashays out the door
leaving you wondering
and then wondering some more.Not you—me.

This is the second collaborative poem of my poet’s circle the PenDragons. Read the first collaborative poem and more about the project in general here.

Thank you so much for reading Morning coffee. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it and I humbly appreciate your visiting the Book of Pain. As always, I look forward to your comments. Please, too, visit my fellow PenDargons’ sites: Julia Dean-Richards of A Place For Poetry (http://aplaceforpoetry.wordpress.com), Elizabeth Cook of Serial Outlet (http://serialoutlet.wordpress.com) and Jordan Joseph Roe of Tierce & Hum (http://tierceandhum.wordpress.com). All are excellent poets and they host excellent sites! I am honored to be in their circle.